Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

> I like a lot of Microsoft stuff these days that plays nice with open source dev tools.

I've spent very little time in the Microsoft ecosystem, but several years ago I was on a contract with a Microsoft shop and I found the MS server-related offerings to be pretty solid (granted, I was not the one paying for them).

The one thing that still shocks me (and maybe it's changed since I last checked, but I'm guessing not) is their pricing model around some offerings that are applied per processor core. Holy moly! Need to blow a lot of cash really fast? Then MS SQL server is for you. Fortunately (/s), it was a government contract, and at that point in the fiscal cycle they were desperate to blow cash so they didn't get less of it the next cycle.

That's always seemed like a perverse incentive to me: the people who do more with less resources get fewer resources the next round. Wouldn't it make more sense to give them more resources and incrementally expand the scope of their duties? They're clearly doing something right. Of course, it's always a balancing game. Perhaps the reason they were so efficient is because they had a limited amount of work to be done, and with more work they may not have performed with the same efficiency.

Perhaps the reasoning behind such a policy is that they're not generally looking for super heroes who might burn themselves out after doing amazing work. They're looking for people who are okay being a little bored, but who will reliably get a specific job done.

> If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?

Because there are quite the number of countries that run massive nation-scale censorship and surveillance campaigns. Google going all-in on encryption of everything, LetsEncrypt being founded - all of that is a direct response to the actions of the US government wiretapping everything including Google's internal datacenter communications and countries like China, Russia and Iran running massive disruption campaigns.

And that doesn't even touch private entities messing with the Internet traffic of their customers - most notably ISPs not just delivering wrong answers on non-existent domains on their own DNS servers to serve ads instead of NXDOMAINs, but going as far as to hijack and rewrite all DNS traffic for that purpose. Or that sniff on DNS requests to sell that data to advertisers (or to the NSA).

And to make it worse, the various "middleboxes" along the Internet placed there by employers forced to comply with dumbass laws, by ISPs doing above-mentioned DPI and manipulation, or by governments of all kind have led to an ossification of Internet protocols because even trivial stuff could lead to issues (remember DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0?).

Yes, it is a good thing that Google leads the way in making encryption ubiquitous. Fuck governments, fuck ISPs, fuck everyone who thinks they have a right to intercept, snoop on, track or analyze my communication.

PS: If an employer (or you) wish to inspect traffic, there are many solutions - the most obvious being a private CA root cert to be installed on the client.

Hangouts migrated to Chat, is that bad?

What's chat? Not gchat surely? Didn't hangouts migrate to meet?

Your basic premise here is that the encryption is good because it provides the privacy to do, essentially, ethical crime. That's all well and good, when indeed, we have governments passing bad laws, but the problem is that it both doesn't actually protect your ethical crime effectively, because Google's only doing it so that they can be the sole arbiter of your data, which they happily distribute to governments en masse on request, and enables a massive swath of unethical crime, aka, the large volume of scams and malware that Google directly profits off the distribution of, while being shielded from any liability for.

The whole evil ISPs tampering with your data thing is just "reading too many Jon Brodkin articles on Ars". I used to have an ISP that tampered with web delivery to deliver a piracy notice, and it nearly didn't get noticed at all, because it neither went to the account owner (me), nor the person who did the crime (not me), but went to a different guest at the house (also not me), who thankfully told me about it, leading me to inquire with their office to get an actual copy of their complaint so I could respond with "wasn't me, told that dude not to do stuff on my Wi-Fi". Which is to say, the effect of an ISP doing this is... generally less harmful than Google using protocols to deliver malicious content, and hilariously ineffective even when they employ it.

What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.

In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.